Coding is hard

[Don]

As a programmer, this argument really bothers me, especially when it's actually used by gaming developers. Almost invariably you'll have some discussion like 'why is X overpowered' or 'Z should be changed' and some people will make this argument, but today I actually saw a Blizzard developer answer to why bosses in Alterac Valley have too few HP because 'coding is complicated'. If an intern can't add a 0 to the HPs of the bosses in Alterac Valley in one day there's something really wrong with the way Blizzard codes things. Now, it is hard to know whether adding a 0 to their HP is sufficient, or even the correct thing to do. This is because DESIGN is hard, but coding is not hard. In fact, most coding stuff is trivial especially in light of game balance. Even when talking about additional content, mostly you don't get them because the company either wants more money for it or they're not sure if it's worth the investment. If your favorite MMORPG lets you have complete control to all their source code, you can probably implement almost any numerical change you'd want in under a week. There's no guraanteed if the resulting game would even be playable but you can definitely do it. I mean I know sometimes somethings that appear to be simple turns out to be surprisingly hard, but adding a 0 to the HP value of some enemy is not one of these things.

[Julius Seeker]

Well, assuming you already know what the change is going to be, it's cleared with producers, implementing a change in HP should be as simple as changing the value in an XML. Then the remaining time is testing and deploying.

I would agree that Blizzard is lying on this one.

[SineSwiper]

Actually, design and balance really is hard. No, it's not coding in this case, but it does involve quite a bit of testing and making sure nothing in overpowered.

Frankly, I think they should balance these things in the same matter that evolution does it: millions of years of survival. Have some world where the players are actually NPCs, fighting just like the creatures, and then put it through a situation.

Of course, with that idea, coding really is hard.

[Julius Seeker]

The design part of boosting an HP value can time consuming for a seemingly small adjustment, but is fairly straight forward.

Although, if someone says this is a difficult coding task, they're feeding a load of bull; outside of the balancing, testing, and deploy, this should be purely a scripting task which any designer can handle.

[Don]

Design can be hard but there are some stuff that are so broken that it's hard to imagine things getting even worse and I'd argue design is easy in such a case.

At any rate I think most game companies do take statistics. Certainly it can't be very hard to say to take statistics on say how many people use character X in a fighting game and what's their winning %, and that's sort of like evolution in itself as the masses are very good at selecting the most broken characters to ensure they win.

And on that note I constantly see game developers deny the equivalent of evolution exists. You can show them statistics like 75% of the players play Zerg and win 80% of the time against non Zerg and they'll still deny an imbalance exists and it'd be premature to fix it. Again if you have such a broken situation (and it's not even uncommon in gaming) it's hard to imagine making things much worse than before.

[SineSwiper]

And on that note I constantly see game developers deny the equivalent of evolution exists. You can show them statistics like 75% of the players play Zerg and win 80% of the time against non Zerg and they'll still deny an imbalance exists and it'd be premature to fix it. Again if you have such a broken situation (and it's not even uncommon in gaming) it's hard to imagine making things much worse than before.

Exhibit B:



"What do you mean that 80% of the winning tourney decks are playing blue-white Cawblade?"

[Don]

Well at least MTG has an incentive to keep certain cards expensive because I'm sure having these uber expensive but must have cards is what keeps people hooked on to the game. It's not even so much the actual sales but rather if you know some card would cost $60-$100 it makes opening a pack at $3 or whatever for a chance to get the $100 card seem like a good investment whereas if there's no equivalent of a Jace people would be more indifferent to invest in packs for a chance of an awesome card.

But yeah often you'd see whoever design the game say stuff like "Oh it's probably just a fad" or the more ridiculous version of: "Only sucky people get beaten by FOTM", even though I'm sure the vast majority of FOTM players can absolutely spank a developer at their own game since given the amount of time you got to play to get good at a game, it's almost unfathomable you'd even be able to get any work done if you also spent enough time to get good at your own game unless you're a pro gamer converted to designer, and even then your skill would quickly drop off because you obviously would not have much chance to hone in your skills once you have to do design as a job. And really, let's say really all the people who lose to this deck just suck and that consist of 99% of the world. Well as devs it's probably a good idea to fix it so that 99% of the world can play adequately instead of hoping that the 99% morons of the world will suddenly get good at the game. If Cable in MvC2 is supposed to be weak against some character, it sure doesn't matter to most people because you'd never get good enough or face someone good enough to punish you for that. I mean I realize everyone complains about anything that's ever beaten them as 'overpowered' but evolution, as Sine puts it, is actually real. If 80% of the players evolved to play a certain way, it's probably because that's a very effective way to win.